


If you see me down the street

by Spylace



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (2012)
Genre: M/M, and well, apparently bucky can't say no, because Steve is oblivious, minor consent issues
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-06-24
Updated: 2013-06-24
Packaged: 2017-12-16 01:09:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,257
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/856045
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Spylace/pseuds/Spylace
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Clint calls them disturbingly Twilight, minus the pro-life message and the hot moms. </p><p>Bruce makes a more erudite observation that they’re more like Apuleius’s Cupid and Psyche but he’s wrong too because that would make the Avengers his jealous sisters and Nick Fury his mother-in-law.</p>
            </blockquote>





	If you see me down the street

When the truth comes out, Clint calls them disturbingly Twilight, minus the pro-life message and the hot moms. Bruce makes a more erudite observation that they’re more like Apuleius’s Cupid and Psyche but he’s wrong too because that would make the Avengers his jealous sisters and Nick Fury his _mother-in-law_.

So no, his story isn’t like that at all.

The first time it happens, Steve is tired. He’s been up for more than forty-eight hours, he’s gone through four showers and a bottle of industrial-strength body wash but he still smells like something fished out of the Hudson. Caught in that awkward phase between awake and sleep, he decides that he’ll burn his bed, mattress and all, after he gets some shut-eye.

Belatedly, he realizes that hey, the window’s open and that’s a big security no-no for the poor fellas watching him through the cameras but the breeze is pleasant, the smell of exhaust almost comforting. And there is something else on the wind, something that whispers of the cold and the wilds of Normandy back in December ’43 when he, Bucky and the Commandos slept in a dog pile so they wouldn’t freeze to death.

Steve has never slept well alone, never had to, and he gropes for the imagined weight, catching nothing but a fistful of frosted air. But there is something there in the dark, at the corner of his bed where the mattress dips ever so slightly as though a bird has landed, shy and bright, brushing against his toes when he wiggles them.

“Bucky?” he asks, recalling the name of a man who hasn’t existed for more than sixty years. His sheets are tucked to his chin, pinned to the corners like whenever Bucky feared he’d catch something.

“Go to sleep Steve.”

Steve sleeps well for the first time since the thaw.

 

Steve could write it off as overactive imagination, retreat into the comforting sleuth of words his counselor uses to label a man out of time. But Steve Rogers did not become Captain America by being a coward and the impression of warmth against his skin doesn’t fade.

He wakes up with fingers carding through his hair in a startlingly intimate gesture that has him blushing red. The hand immediately retreats and he reaches out, wrapping an arm around the middle of what was arguably the most solid dream construct he’s ever created.

The body of the other man (and what else could he be?) is foreign to him, muscular and lean without an ounce of fat, like it had been strained out of everything unnecessary and compressed into one deadly package.

“Don’t go.” He mumbles, crushing his face against Bucky’s spine. Steve breathes into the leather and gun oil, something sharp and metallic like placing a coin on top of his tongue. “Bucky, stay.”

Bucky relents, if only because it’s hard to breathe with Captain American clamped against his side.   

“This is a bad idea.” He warns, wrapping an arm around his shoulders but Steve can’t bring himself to care. His voice is the best thing he’s heard since the thaw. He squeezes harder until Bucky grunts, “Hey buddy, I ain’t goin’ nowhere alright?”

Steve snorts. He’s heard that one before and no matter how real Bucky feels, he won’t fall for it, not this time. Bucky ruffles his hair like they’re eight and nine, at an orphanage with a mattress all to themselves. “You’re a mess Steve. Hasn’t SHIELD been taking care of you?”

“Not the same.” He replies. “Missed you.”

Bucky’s response is a long time coming.

“...I missed you too.”

His bed is empty in the morning.

Steve gets up, turns the shower on as hot as he can make it and stands there until the water runs cold.

 

The arm is new.

Steve discovers as he runs his hand down the side of his face, trying to match his memories with this hollow-eyed stranger with shiny teeth. Bucky’s left arm, despite his eyes trying to convince him that it’s the same as the other, is cold to touch, barely warms when he presses his palm across its smooth surface.

He doesn’t understand. It’s his dream. Doesn’t he get to control it? Any of it?

Bucky’s left arm goes up to where it meets the shoulder then it’s an endless field of scars where the skin has been ripped and stitched anew so many times it has its own spongy texture. His fingers dig down and he can literally feel the other man shiver, the gears grinding as his shoulder rotates like an axel in a hub.

“What, you just noticed?”

Bucky says sardonically and he tries to pull back.

“What happened?”

It’s dark, the room’s dark and the light’s not on because it might destroy whatever magic they’re weaving between them. Steve breathes and reaches out. Bucky’s still there, his face warm and solid beneath his thumb. A sliver of light catches his frosty blue eyes.

“The war happened Steve. Ain’t nothin’ you can do about it.”

 

America is the land of dreams and maybe because of that, he looks forward to nights when he gets to sleep in bed. Bucky during daytime is a rare, fleeting creature, often disturbed by Tony throwing paper balls in the trash bin or otherwise engaging in siege warfare with Clint over stacks of paperclips.

“Steve, are you alright?” Bruce asks, having drawn the short straw in the latest installment of _what’s up with Steve_.

“Yeah” Steve answers automatically. A moment passes. “Why wouldn’t I be?”

The other man’s expression tells him that he’s not convinced. Steve shrugs.

“It’s just, I miss my friends sometimes you know? Um, not that you guys aren’t great but...”

Bruce pats him on the shoulder. It’s startling because he’s never touched anyone before, not without taking a temperature or trying to tear someone apart. His camaraderie is as alien as it is welcome. Bruce makes a sympathetic face as though he understands.

“It’s okay to miss people Steve.”

 

“Are you real?” He asks one night, boneless as fingers knead against his back, digging into his shoulders as though it can somehow get at the persistent _ache_.

Bucky makes a wounded noise.

“I’m as real as you are pal.”

Almost unconsciously, he rocks into the pressure between his thighs because it feels good, it feels easy and the solid presence above him is soothing like a balm. He’s never slept well alone, never had to, always had Bucky or the commandos or the showgirls sleeping side-by-side, and he gropes for the other before he can get away.

He’s dreaming. Probably.

That’s why this is okay.

“ _Steve_ ”

Bucky sounds distressed, his wrist caught in his grip.

“I’m okay.” Steve assures him in between his fluttering breaths. He comes against the mattress, his orgasm muted. Rolling over, he hugs Bucky to his chest, kissing him on top of his forehead. “I’m okay.”

 

For a few days afterwards, Bucky disappears. Steve waits. It’s only fair.

Bucky has been waiting for a long time.

“I’ve been having these dreams.” He tells his counselor blushing because it doesn’t matter if she’s heard everything from Agent Woo’s problem with his girlfriends to the fact that Carter is clearly in a dangerous relationship with a woman who clearly looks like villain of the week #1521.

This is private. It has nothing to do with propriety or antiquated values of a man who should, by all rights, be ninety and look it. This is about Bucky, the man whom features in his nightmares as much as he does in dreams.

“Please tell me more.” She asks as though reading off a script.

There are coma patients who suddenly wake up after ten years to find the world changed, their bodies grown old. Steve went to sleep nearly seventy years ago with a promise of a dance and a prayer on his lips. He woke up, not a day older than when he had been remade, when he found Bucky and lost him all over again.

Steve is different like Bruce Banner and Thor are different.

They’re both lost in a world they’re desperately trying to save.

 

“You’re cold.” Steve observes, patting down the solid muscle as Bucky sits at the far edge of the bed where he can barely reach. In the war, Bucky never quite got back the weight he lost, always shivering in his blue coat when he thought no one was looking. By contrast, Steve was like a furnace, even went skinny dipping in an icy river on a stupid dare.

Bucky nearly had a heart attack when he heard.

They used to share a sleeping bag and pretended nothing happened the next morning. “C’mere” he says sleepily as Bucky shifts with a mild hum. “Mmm, not supposed to be here.”

Now that was just silly. Who needed Bucky more than he did?

“Where would you go?” He mumbles, inching over until he has his head in the other man’s lap. “You’re in my head.”

“What?”

“Stay Bucky, stay.” Steve begs. Bucky lets out a harsh bark of self-recrimination and strokes his hair. “You deserve more than this.”

“I let you fall.”

“It wasn’t your fault.”

Steve closes his eyes. The scene doesn’t change.

“Yes it was.”

 

Steve presses generous kisses up Bucky’s spine, nibbling one ear and burying his nose against the shorn scalp. He wants to see what Bucky looks like under the lights, wonders if time has faded his memory of the movie star-esque features. But he doesn’t reach for the switch and Bucky doesn’t either. He rocks into the other man who squeezes like a vice, hot, tight and wonderful in ways that dreams had no right to be when reality was so bleak.

“I’m sorry.” He gasps, voicing out all the things that could never be said. “I’m sorry I didn’t save you.”

“You fucking, _jerk_.” Bucky pants, in tandem with his thrusts. He grasps at the sheets as a drowning man would a handful of straws. Steve pins his metal hand against the mattress, squeezing it in a bone-crushing grip that would have displaced the metacarpals had it been made of flesh. “You. Don’t. Get. To. Take. All. The. Blame.”

“You wouldn’t have taken seventy years to find me.”

Bucky groans when he comes, turning his head to bite down on Steve’s nose. He licks off the droplets of sweat when he protests, muffling the words against his lips. “You’ve never been lost.”

 

Steve is unceremoniously dumped on his couch after leaving medical ADA. His saving grace from a night in a back alley, sleeping it off like a mugging victim is that both Natasha and Clint come after him, unnerved by the sickly grey sheen of his skin.

His head rolls before dropping against one shoulder. He thinks that it might fall off and get lost under something. That would be bad though he is sure Bucky will find it for him. Bucky has always been there for him.

He protests when they turn the lights on, momentarily blinded by the gauzy halo of exhaustion taking toll. Immediately, Clint has his bow out and strung, an arrow mounted and aimed at the window where Bucky’s been waiting like a neighborhood cat, wide-eyed at their entrance.

“No Clint!” Natasha forcibly pushes the arrow down as Bucky jumps into the room, his boots barely making a sound as he lands on the wooden floor. Dazed, Steve smiles, hands tightening across the armrest as he struggles to sit up.

“Hey punk, you have a good time?”

Bucky looks good, his persistent fear had been a mangled corpse seared black from the cold. He is warm when he presses a soft kiss against his forehead. Steve hums in agreement, reaching out just to touch.

“Nat” Clint says, sounding shocked and appalled and shocked all at once. He wonders why. “Who is this guy?”

Natasha ignores him. “Yasha, you shouldn’t be here.”

Bucky shrugs easily, looking like the seven-year-old boy who got told off by the sisters for breaking someone’s nose. Steve expects— _he started it_ , but what comes out of Bucky’s mouth is “What was I supposed to do? Nobody tells me anything and trying to pry information from the probies is like playing a game of telephone. I hear that Steve’s been taken to medical but when I get to medical he ain’t there. Couldn’t just leave without seeing him.”

Something doesn’t feel right here.

“Wait” he rasps, dread knotting his stomach. “Clint, Natasha, you can see him?”

Clint stares like he’s grown a second head. “Of course we can,” he gestures dramatically. “He’s right here.”

He turns back to Bucky who seems startled by the question.

“You’re _real_.”

“How hard did he get hit in the head?” Bucky demands, holding Steve’s hand in both of his hands.

“He didn’t.” Natasha says coolly. “It’s just fatigue from energy depletion.”

Steve can feel now, clearly, which hand is hot and which hand is cold, the overlapping plates where his left arm used to be. He can see the red star embossed across his deltoid, scratched out fervently with a rock or something equally blunt and wonder what the story is behind it.

“Steve, hey buddy, you alright there?”

“You’re... real.” Steve repeats dumbly.

Bucky frowns. “I’m going to take him in.”

“Yasha” Natasha snaps, “You are supposed to be on a mission.”

Bucky glares back at her mulishly before giving her a sharp nod.

“Then take better care of him Jesus, he’s still human.”

“Go” Her voice softens. “We’ll take it from here.”

Bucky leaves.

“Wait, wait, wait.” Clint interrupts, slack-jawed. “Was, was that _who I think it was_?”

Natasha rolls her eyes. “Yes Clint, that was the man you wanted to grow up to marry.”

Clint squawks indignantly.

Things are making a lot more sense.

 

Tony squints in consternation.

“You’ve been having dream-sex with your best friend for how long now?”

“Tony!” Everyone else shouts, still walking on eggshells after this particular revelation.  

Steve blushes hotly.

“Look it’s not like that. We weren’t like that.”

“Woah Cap,” Tony says defensively, holding up his hands. “Twenty-first century, nothing to be ashamed of. You’re a hero, who cares if you’ve been doing the nasty with a freezer-burned centenarian?”

“I told you, I thought it wasn’t _real_.”

“I understand.” Tony says and Bruce lets out a depreciating sigh like he knows what’s coming. But hope springs eternal and Steve’s always been an optimist.

“You do?”

“Sure. It’s kind of like Brokeback Mountain.”

“...I don’t get it.”

“No, no” Clint waves knowledgeably. “It’s like Twilight. He breaks into your apartment at night and stares at you creepily until you’re shamed into having no sex until marriage.”

“I personally think it’s more like Cupid and Psyche.” Bruce says absentmindedly, circling the rim of his coffee cup until it squeaks. He drops his hand as though startled and Thor asks, “Who are these Cupid and Psyche you speak of?”

Bruce warms to the subject, regales them with a tale of a god who falls in love with a mortal woman and comes to visit her every night after dark to hide his face.

Thor nods encouragingly though he frowns at places because he doesn’t understand why Cupid couldn’t simply appear before his beloved bride. But when they get to the bit about the tasks Aphrodite demands for her son’s hand, he becomes animated.

Okay, so he would be Psyche in this scenario if Psyche was also a moron who didn’t recognize her best friend of most of her conscious life. Now Steve feels bad.

He wants to go back to his apartment to wait for him; he’s supposed to be on a mission. Natasha said as much in the first hour before she expended her daily quota of human interaction by explaining to Clint that under no circumstances would she be giving out Bucky’s comm. number to anyone. She was not a dateline for the Winter Soldier, whoever that is. Steve isn’t sure whether to feel grateful or bitter that she seems to know Bucky better than he does at the moment.

But Thor is hooked on the idea of some grand quest and it’s infectious. So it turns out he does have to proverbial music and confront Fury about the whereabouts of one Sergeant James Buchannan Barnes of the 107th, last presumed killed in action.

“Where is he?” He demands, the script Tony and Clint painstakingly prepared thrown out the window. Steve hears a muffled groan from behind the steel-enforced door.

Thankfully, Fury ignores it. “Have a seat Captain.”

There is a thin file on the table, several photos, nothing concrete.

“Barnes is on a mission in Berat, Albania. He hasn’t checked in in 32 hours.”

The rest of the Avengers spill into the doorway.

Clint gives him a thumbs up.

“Let’s do this.”

 

“I had him on the ropes.” Steve pouts when Bucky drops the man with a well-aimed chop to the back of his neck.

“Sure did, way to break my cover Romeo.”

Bucky complains when they bust him out of an AIM cell hidden deep inside an abandoned bunker. He’s been there for approximately three hours and would have escaped with three more. His face is bruised, nose bloodied with severe lacerations around one eye but all of his limbs remain intact, no worse for wear than when he was defending Steve in the back alleys of Brooklyn.

Still, Steve cannot help but run his fingers over the other man’s face, aggrieved at faint lines and scars that hadn’t been there before.

Bucky shoots an aggrieved look at Widow.

“I thought you had this.”

“I like a good romance.” She deadpans, reloading her guns.

Steve pulls him behind a wall before he can get his head shot off.

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

“Tell you what?”

“That you were real!”

Bucky sputters. “I thought you knew! You called me Bucky!”

“I thought I was dreaming!”

Clint makes a face from around a corner.

“ _Awkward_ ”

“Guys” Bruce sighs over the comm. static lacing his every breath. “We do have an _army_ headed our way.”

Steve grumbles.

“Call it Cap.”

“Avengers Assemble!”

 

“So it turns out we were both stupid.”

“Time out, how am I the stupid one?”

“You did sort of leave me and ran off to Albania where you got caught by AIM operatives instead of you know, explaining it to me like an adult.” Steve points out helpfully as he helps Bucky strip, hands lingering over every layer, strap and zippers because he still can’t believe this is real.

“I still can’t believe you thought I was a dream.” Bucky retorts, flinging his bloody socks off like they’re boomerangs. His aim is true; it lands perfectly in the trash bin.

“You were a good dream?” Steve hazards, trying to assuage his friend’s wounded pride. “Except for the part where you were experimented on by Soviet scientists to become some sort of a superspy. That part sucked.”

“Oh yeah?” Bucky turns around, the lights and shadows playing off the angles of his face like a rococo painting. Steve wants to draw him sometime, compare with the pictures from his memories to see if he had them right. “Which part was your favorite?”

Bucky kisses him and Steve sort of moves into it thinking about Cupid and Psyche, how after everything, they got to be together. Forever. If only they could be so lucky. Maybe having the Avengers as his psedu-sisters wasn’t so bad after all.

“No comment.”

**Author's Note:**

> It is my firm belief that Clint has in fact read all four of the Twilight Saga. Possibly to pick up the hot moms at the cinemas.


End file.
